13 March 2009 - 14:05ProCasts’ third open-src advocacy video – AdBlockPlus

I’m rather chuffed to say that Wladimir Palant, the chap behind the excellent AdBlockPlus.org ad-filter for Firefox, has added our advocacy video to his frontpage – it shows you in just over a minute how and why to install AdBlockPlus.  As Wladimir says:

Ian and Richard [...] offered me to create a screencast for Adblock Plus. They then went on analyzing what potential users need to know and the result is quite remarkable

We created the video to show how Richard and I can work together inside ProCasts combining animation and screencasting techniques, backed by music and scripting, to teach new users exactly why they will want to use this new tool and how they should get started.

We went through the full process of:

1. understanding who the users are
2. learning what they need
3. asking about what confuses them
4. figuring out how to tell the story
5. screencasting prototypes
6. wrapping everything in animated segments

I plan to blog at ProCasts about all the steps including showing some of the draft videos, this should give others some ideas for how to iterate on larger  screencasting projects.

The previous advocacy videos have been Django (Python web-framework) in Under a Minute and Internet Explorer 8 vs Firefox 3.

Richard has blogged an AdBlockPlus entry too.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.